Drop-out and returns: UK students at Scottish universities

This is the second blog about students dropping out of university. The first blog considered statistics published by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) on 8 March 2018 showing non-continuation (“drop-out”) rates among full time degree students at Scottish higher education institutions (HEIs).

As part of the same release, HESA also published statistics on UK students who resumed their studies after a year away. As with the drop-out statistics, these offer data for each Scottish HEI, but cannot tell us specifically about Scottish domiciled students attending Scottish HEIs. That said, the data does tell an interesting story about the overall picture of returns to study after a year away.

Returning to study

What is interesting about these figures is that they tell us about a different part of the experience of drop-out. Instead of just counting the number of students that don’t progress from first to second year of a degree programme they indicate whether students that have dropped out after first year return after a year away.

So what these figures report on is students that started a full time degree in academic year 2014-15 who dropped out in 2015-16. The question here is what happened to them in academic year 2016-17? Did they return to study or remain out of higher education?

As with the drop-out statistics, the figures published by HESA tell a general story about return rates among young students (those who were under 21 when they started their degree) and mature students (those who were 21 or older when they stated their degree). In this blog, I’ve only analyzed and reported the all age figures but the same trends as were seen with drop-out rates apply. In short, it is more common for mature students not to return to their studies than young students.

Table 1 is provided here to give some context to the issues discussed later when we turn to consider percentages of students returning or not returning to higher education after a year away. It simply intends to show, for each Scottish HEI, the number of students being tracked through from entry in 2014-15, drop-out in 2015-16 and whether they return in 2016-17.

Figure 2 shows the proportion of students who started in 2014-15 and remained out of higher education in 2016-17. The average figure across all Scottish HEIs was 5.8%, while there was significant variance between institutions:

At St Andrews (1.4%) and Edinburgh (2.5%) the non-return rate was relatively low.

At Queen Margaret (11.2%) and University of Highlands and Islands (11.5%) the non-return rate was relatively high.

Figure 2: Proportion of 2014-15 entrants who had not returned to higher education by 2016-17

As with the data on drop-out from degree study, the reasons that students drop out and do (or do not) return after a year away are likely to be varied and complex. The statistics certainly cannot tell us why some students are more likely to drop out, and why some return, while others do not. They also cannot tell us about why there are differences between institutions.

What these figures do offer are two interesting messages. The first is that there are significant differences in return rates between different HEIs. The second perhaps more important message is that, for some students at least, dropping out at the end of first year does not necessarily mean the end of their time in higher education.

Suzi Macpherson, Senior Researcher, Justice and Social Affairs Research Unit